 It's time to look at the energetic costs of sex. I would like you to take a minute to think about how, you know, when we think about cost, we think about money. Money is resource. It takes energy to earn money and we invest. We eat so that we have enough energy to go get our jobs so that we can get money so that we can do things with money like buy foods so that we can eat more so that we can go work in our jobs. But think, we can make an analogy between our investment as critters in sex, what we're willing to pay for sex, for being sexually attractive to someone else and potentially making babies with that someone else. Okay, so it's got to be like awesome if we're actually going to do this. Look at how much money, how much industry is out there doing its thing and making money off of our desire to make babies. Internet like dating services, I mean we'll pay money, we'll watch advertisements, we'll do, we'll read books. Like look at this, you can find your dating and your Facebook, how to find your homie on Facebook and your boyfriend from matchmaking. I mean like go look for, I want to find a boyfriend and you will be like you could spend all day and all your money on strategies to get yourself a boyfriend, which let's not talk about that too much. Let's just keep this on a biological standpoint. Dude, let's talk about makeup. How much money do we spend on makeup? Well, some of us spend money on makeup. Others of us, I don't know what my excuse is, but there's a lot of money that is spent on making us feel good about how we look. Like this guy, how much money did he spend to give his tail feathers that kind of bling-bling? Obviously he didn't spend money making his tail feathers look like that, but he did spend food. And think about the cost of having a tail like that. If you're strutting around with that kind of a tail, why? Because you are guaranteed to be eaten by a lion. If you have a tail like that, you're going to be slow. You're going to be super obvious. Like why would anybody have that? That is not necessarily the result of weird humanness. That's actually what the ladies find fine. And so the lady pee foul, look at this guy and go, dude, I'll make babies with him. That's awesome. I totally want kids that have those genetics in that amazing tail. And it's worth it to him that he's more likely to get eaten by the lion. It's worth it because he's also more likely to get with the ladies. Think about it. I mean, look at these birds. These birds make these fantastic nests and presentations to the ladies. How much energy are these guys spending going around collecting their special colored things to impress the ladies? Wouldn't you want to go make a baby with a guy who could build this kind of gorgeous little setup right here? I'm super impressed. It's expensive. That takes a lot of food energy to make that happen and to be that awesome and impressive, but it's worth it. There's something about it that's worth it. I mean, building houses and having fancy tail feathers, that's awesome, but I've got three stories here of sexual investments that are clearly completely baffling. Let's start out with the banana slugs. Slug sex is... Oh, my gosh. Okay, so these slugs, they find each other. They're like, hey, baby. And their slugs have boy parts and girl parts. So they are both male and female. And they find each other and they start having some foreplay action going on. And their foreplay takes forever because they have to go walk around each other a million times and they twirl together and they get closer and closer. And then pretty soon they start biting each other and slimy everywhere. And then pretty soon, they start this race to see who is going to get their penis into the other one first. So a penis. A penis is... The whole point of a penis is to put sperm from one place to another place. And there's all sorts of penis designs to make this happen. So these slugs are slimy around each other and trying to get their penises into the other one. And it's so worth it. They're biting each other. Whoever gets it in there first is the boy and gets to fertilize the eggs. And if you think about that, he who can leave the sperm, the other one has to deal with the eggs. And so she now is going to have to go off and take care of the eggs. So there's this whole other layer of investment for the one that isn't the penis bearer in that interaction. But this is crazy. So worth it that sometimes the penises get stuck because it takes so long and the penis is giant and it gets stuck in the other one. So worth it they bite it off. What? You bite off your penis. You spend all this energy to make a penis in the first place so that you can pass on your genetics. And then it gets stuck and you're like, dude, I'll just make another one and you bite it off. That cannot be a pleasant experience. They do it. They keep doing it. Not very many male honeybees or bumblebees or whatever kind of bee this is. The boys, when it's their turn, possibly impregnate or what fertilize the eggs of a queen bee, they basically throw exploding testes at the lady and hope that their sperm get in her and their testes are done, like they explode. And worth it. This is the epic sacrifice for sex. This is an anglerfish, like the kind in Finding Nemo. And this is the girl. And she's huge compared to the boy. But anglerfish live way down deep in the ocean. So they're just chilling down there in the ocean. It's dark. No, we can see anything. And it's kind of hard to find others of your kind. So the ladies have their lady smell. And the fellas, they're tiny. They're like, I mean, this is a fella right here. He's like tiny compared to her. And not only is he tiny compared to her, he doesn't have a digestive system. He's like a giant smelling organ and a testee in his little body. And he swims around and smells for the lady. And hopefully when he finds her, this is the ultimate, like how can this be worth it? He bites her, attaches himself to her body. He's literally attached to her right now. And he basically becomes like a little parasite that her body takes over, takes him over. He, her blood supply goes in and like fuels him. And it's almost like a little pregnancy. But she grows herself around this male that bit her and attached to her. And he degenerates into nothing except for his testee, her blood supply, so that she collects these little males all over her body. And they're like little hanging testes all over her body. And then she's like, dude, now I've got a collection of them. I can basically make babies whenever I feel like it because I've got this collection of male parasite testes hanging off of me. How handy is that? I mean, that's incredible. Let's just take a second. I mean, I can go on all day. There's no question. Let's take a second just to look at penises. The investment in a penis. And take a look at these penises. Dude, this is some kind of like whistling duck or something amazing. That is his drive-by penis. He flies in the air and has this like spiral corkscrew penis and he flings his penis out at a flying lady when she is flying by. And inseminates, throws his sperm in, basically has sex with her midair with this like corkscrew penis. Maintaining that thing? That's got to be some effort right there. Then let's just talk about the barnacle penis while we're at it. The barnacle penis is the longest penis in the animal kingdom compared to body size. You know what a barnacle is? It's those little volcano things that are out in the ocean and they have feathery feet and they filter feed like this. And they live inside those little volcanoes. And you can imagine, dude, how is this thing ever going to have sex with anybody? Well, it grows the longest penis on the planet and reaches out the longer its penises, the more likely it is to be able to have sex with lots of different people around it because it can't get up and move. It can't go and make its face all make-up-y and beautiful to impress anybody. So it just has to make this huge penis that can come out and inseminate whoever's eggs are in the vicinity. Penises are amazing. And then I just can't help it because we have to talk about the gorilla penis because gorillas, do you think they need giant penises? No. The gorilla is huge and he really doesn't need to invest his energy in a penis. He needs a penis so that he can pass on his sperm. But other than that, like, who cares? He can have sex with whoever he wants because he's gigantic. And the bigger he is, the more likely he is to have sex with whoever he wants. He doesn't need the corkscrew penis for a drive-by insemination event. He can just tackle someone, do his thing, and then leave. And his penis is almost like whatever. It's just necessary, but certainly doesn't have to be flashy or gigantic. The point is that critters of all kinds, including us, are willing to invest tremendous amounts of energy, whether it be money, food, body, mass, whatever. We invest a lot of energy in obtaining sexual partners and carrying out sexual reproduction. Okay. Why? There's got to be a reason that we would be willing to do this. I'm about to tell you.